Thursday, July 15, 2004

Okay, I know I said radio silence, but Max decided to bring the laptop, and we got the high-speed connection going in the room, so...

We're here at Thunder. Or rather, it's the gathering storm, if you will. Kinky people are beginning to invade. but we won't have complete control of the whole hotel until tomorrow, when the conference officially begins.

It's always rather amusing, actually, to walk around the hotel lobby and the bar on Thursday afternoon and say to oneself, "They're here for the conference, but they're not. Oh, he is definitely one of us, but those women aren't..." We more or less behave ourself in the public spaces (most of us do, anyway) and especially so when the vanilla folks are still here. But you can spot the kinksters...

It's harder on Sunday afternoon, when the hotel starts checking in vanilla guests again. We've had free run of the place for two days, and everyone is pleasantly exhausted by a weekend of non-stop activity in an entirely kink-oriented world. One has to remind oneself to be mindful, once again, of explicit conversations in a close quarters with the non-kinky folks. Not everyone does the re-entry thing well, you understand. Last year at this con I was standing in an elevator with three perverts and two airline personnel and listened to this conversation.

"So I was flogging the clothespins off his balls last night at the party and a little bit of skin came with them. You should have heard him howl."
"I did hear him carrying on, but I couldn't see what you were doing, exactly. I had my hands full with the suspension X and I were doing."

Banjo eyes on the airline people, to which the two men having the conversation seemed completely oblivious. Or maybe they were doing it just to fuck with them, I don't know. I don't approve of that kind of thing generally - I think it's rude and childish. I don't want to be forced to listen to intimate things about the sexual lives of most strangers, either. But on this occasion, for some reason, I was torn between annoyance and amusement. Maybe it was the utterly blase tone of voice they were speaking in...

Tomorrow we'll get out registration packets, look over the workshop schedule - Thunder has the best workshops! - and then just sit in the lobby and watch out friends arrive. Then dinner, and then - the dungeon party.I don't know if I'll post again, but if I get a minute, I'll drop by...